The Tellers stems from the same questions underlying the virtual exhibition A Whole Population of Poets promoted by Sumac Space, a digital platform aimed at enhancing contemporary Middle Eastern art through a busy schedule of meetings, critical contributions and research projects. Since the advent of The Green Wave in Iran in 2009 I have been pervaded by an ambivalence of optimism and anxiety for the future: a future that I will never be able to articulate as a purely temporal event but which I would rather like to navigate freely, as along the timeline of a post production application, without having to “snap” to a specific date.

I am experimenting with some methods to transform this anxiety. One of the most powerful tools is the imagination and the landscapes that are outlined in a dream, in a dreamlike space that represents for me a form of resistance to the lived and perceived world. I know it is not the promise of an alternate universe, nor does it offer a loophole to escape the one we live in. However, it helps me create the conditions for a different way of existing within the present universe. The Middle East's past unfolds in a series of interconnected forms. It brings together - here as elsewhere - the changes that occur in the lives of people and groups, cultures and countries over time. It embodies the narratives that people share about themselves and others in relation to these transitions, the myths that help them make sense of their experiences and that try to shed new light on the road to the future. These narratives represent a tool to create a new landscape as a possibility to escape from pre-existing power structures.

In The Tellers , the artists invite us to enter an imaginary time. The construction of future scenarios acts as a kind of temporal feedback loop, connecting these different versions of the future to the present or the distant past. These are speculations in the form of intuitions referring to objects, places or even events located in the future or relegated to the distant past, whether they are imaginary or simply so traumatic as to escape memory. Artists use storytelling to build new myths and new stories, to question the now forgotten and repressed history using it as a simulacrum for social critique. For them, becoming storytellers involves a commitment to examine existing narratives and construct new truths that lie outside the dominant cultural history. These artists challenge each of us to understand the perspective of the other, welcome us into their new worlds and push us to venture on the confusing dividing line between the real and the imaginary.